


On the Palest Horse

by cadmean



Category: 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: Dating, Established Relationship, F/F, Post-Canon, Slice of Life, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 19:30:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14940461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadmean/pseuds/cadmean
Summary: The hotel infested with vampires hadn't presented a problem to the four of them, and that, more than anything, should have tipped Lucy off.Or: Lucy and Claire are forced to contend with a date-crashing vampire.





	On the Palest Horse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).



“Told you it only works if you’re a virgin,” Lucy crowed gleefully, her hands digging tight into the folds of the tattered, bat-gut splattered remains of Claire’s hoody. Every step the horse took jostled her grip further and further up Claire’s hips, distracting her more and more from what was quickly growing to be another great big disaster of a vampire hunt.

> Not that it would be the last time, either; Lucy didn’t believe in that kind of good luck.

“You should’ve booked two separate rooms for us, then,” Claire grumbled, too focused on keeping the horse from mis-stepping to provide much counter in the way of conversation.

Lucy shrugged, and gave Claire’s waist a gentle squeeze. “Yes, well. Let’s keep on trying – even if the horse doesn’t find the right grave, at the very least the ruckus we’re creating will attract the vampire. The three of us,” and she patted the horse, “make for a very good-looking snack.”

And was she only imagining it, or was that the sound of flapping bat-wings drawing ever closer?

> Probably her imagination. Vampires tended to be awfully quiet unless you surprised them while they were feeding, in which case the noises they made were so obvious that even the least attentive person knew to stay well away – or, if they were a hunter, to prepare their preferred method of extermination.

The horse let out a strange sound.

“Keep her steady,” Lucy murmured.

“I’m _trying._ Maybe it means the vampire’s close?”

“Could very well be.”

At that the horse bucked, none-too gently jostling Lucy against Claire and all but sending them tumbling off of its back. It was more luck than anything that saved them; Claire’s foot tangling in the stirrup and Lucy still hanging tight onto Claire, and so it was only when a strap in the makeshift saddle audibly snapped that they actually hit the ground.

The air left Lucy’s lungs on impact, but she pushed through the pain and gulped in several breaths and forced herself to get back up to her feet, dragging up Claire, who had fallen half on top of her, along as well.

“What—“ she wheezed.

And in front of her and Claire, the horse was shrinking and twisting and very much no longer a horse as it began to berate them, “It’s the horse that has to be a virgin, you know. Not the hunters – though you two do look like very good snacks, and if I dare say so myself, my horse was pretty spot-on, too.”

Claire proved yet again that she was just as avid a curser as Lucy, before telling her, “This is the worst date you’ve ever taken me out on.” With several quick, practiced motions she unholstered the pair of quadruple-blessed pistols Luke had gifted her.

“Yes, well.”

 

* * *

 

Alright. Let’s rewind a bit.

> They hadn’t started out the day with a horse, of course, and it wasn’t like they’d actively gone looking for one later on, either. Sometimes these things just happened, and Lucy, though never one to believe in provenance, also wasn’t one to turn down the literal gift horse.
> 
> She also wasn’t one to expect the gift horse to be a shapeshifted vampire, mind, but that was a Monday night for you.

 

* * *

 

Earlier that morning – the sun already beating down with the terrible, dry ferocity only summer can manage – the four of them had risen bright and early and totally not still slightly drunk from the night before. But there’d been cause to celebrate, Lucy figured; after all, you didn’t defeat a whole hotel full of vampires to go to bed right after like a half-way normal person, did you?

It did make breakfast a laborious affair, though, by virtue of the kitchen still being covered in the dusty remnants of all too many vampires.

There’d been pancake mix and some milk stashed in the far corners of the fridge behind several gelid-looking packs of blood, and Claire had proven herself to be quite adept at pouring the mix into some pans and not letting it all burn into a charcoaly mess.

> Luke had grumbled something about his last time having been bad luck and really, there had been an old man breathing down his neck and if there was one thing that worse than centuries-old abominations, it was senior citizens ignoring the desiccated corpse of a vampire behind the counter and demanding their customary breakfast.

It was a testament to how backwater a place Andover’s Lot was that nobody seemed to pay any attention to the four of them as they later left the hotel, carrying bags of wooden stakes, blessed water, and the newest high-powered water guns.

“You two alright with staying here for another night?” Luke asked once they’d gotten everything loaded into the van. “There’s not much to do, but, hey, at the very least you won’t be in danger of running into any more leeches.”

> This is what they call dramatic irony.

“We’ll be fine,” Lucy said, nodding over to Claire and Maggie, who were chatting away and showing each other some more pics from last night’s hunt.

> Not that there was all that much to see, of course; but there was a certain abstract beauty to seeing pictures of yourself fighting empty air that both Maggie and Claire had found a foible for.

“Me and Claire, we’re just going to hang around, maybe have some ice-cream. Have a proper date, if we can.”

Luke had laughed, but good-naturedly. “Good luck with that. Call me or Maggie if anything happens.”

With a cuff to his arm Lucy laughed it off.

> The last time she’d needed backup had been at the McDonald’s, and that had been more than half a year ago. She’d be fine, and Claire would be, too.

Claire and Lucy waved after the van until it had disappeared into the heat-haze flimmering above the highway, and only when the sun beating down on them grew altogether too harsh did they turn away and began looking for some shade.

 

* * *

 

Finding a nice little spot to have a coffee and maybe some dessert and just pretend to be a normal human did, in fact, prove to be more difficult than cleaning up a vampire hotel.

Because that was Andover’s Lot for you: a tiny hotel, a little stable with no horses they could see, a run-down bar, several fast-food restaurants and two-and-a-half Wal-Marts, and no movie theaters to speak of. The only reason they’d even ended up here in the first place was because the van had broken down – that the hotel was infested with something far more annoying than bedbugs they’d only figured out after their first night, when Lucy had come across the blood-drained corpse of the businessman who had checked in the day before together with them.

But with that whole three-story infestation turned to dust, there was nothing much left to hide the fact that Andover’s Lot was as boring a place as could be.

Holding hands and occasionally bumping shoulders, Claire and Lucy spent the morning walking through town, passing judgement on the dismal size of the place and trying to find somewhere nice to spend the day. The bar Claire vetoed from the get-go, citing the lingering remains of a hangover; the two-and-a-half Wal-Marts were air-conditioned, which was nice, but they also weren’t the greatest places to spend a whole lot of time at; and the both of them had made a point not to spend any more time in fast-food restaurants than they absolutely had to.

> This had proven to be more difficult than either of them could have anticipated, mainly by virtue of there being far too many fast food restaurants to keep track of. There was your Arby’s and your McDonald’s, of course, and in a wider sense Subway and Dunkin’ Donuts and all the quick-made fat you could possibly throw at a given food. Those at least didn’t try to hide their true nature, though, and Lucy had to give them some respect for that. No, what _really_ killed her enthusiasm for a nice burger was walking into a seemingly normal restaurant and being greeted by the oily air, neon lights, amazing technicolor decorations and that sense of utter defeat that came with an undercover fast-food joint just having sprung its trap on you.

The day was growing ever hotter, and by midday Lucy had just about given up on ever being able to have a coffee date like a normal person. Claire, thankfully, was less walking-zombie and more slightly-dispirited-human, and so it didn’t come as any particular surprise to Lucy when Claire suddenly grabbed her hand all the tighter and pulled her to a halt.

“Look,” she hissed, Lucy immediately tensing and glancing about for the threat, “There’s a coffee shop.”

And, indeed: squeezed into a small plot between an apartment complex and a tiniest parking garage Lucy had ever seen, was a coffee shop. Not even one of the chain ones, but one of those artsy-looking little places that always seemed to consist more of various haphazardly-thrown-together pieces of decoration than anything – not quite the type of place Lucy usually dropped in on, but judging by the flashy art spray-painted onto the exterior of the shop, it definitely seemed like the kind of thing Claire would enjoy.

And, yes, when she looked over at Claire, there was that characteristic glint to her eyes that meant that she’d already made up her mind.

“Nice find,” Lucy told her. “Let’s go inside?”

> The fact that the coffee shop was located right next to a graveyard and its accompanying church should perhaps have tipped them off, but by that point Lucy had come to the conclusion that the town was so small that _everything_ bordered the graveyard, and so didn’t exercise as much caution as she, in hindsight, probably should have.

The inside of the coffee shop was just as colorful as its exterior. The tables were low, the chairs had more cushions than seemed sustainable in the long run, and the pots lined up in neat rows on the shelves behind the counter were mixed and matched to a quite frankly astounding degree. The smell of freshly-brewed coffee saturated the air, and though there was no air-conditioning to speak of, it was blessedly cool inside. The ceilings were higher than Lucy would have expected, but they lent the interior a sort of cozy, barn-like feel to it that was a nice change from the utilitarian makeup of the hotel.

There was also a vampire standing in front of the counter, animatedly chatting with the barista.

> You couldn’t have everything.

Barista and vampire looked to be about the same age, though Lucy knew full well that that didn’t have to mean anything – in fact, given how sunny it was outside, that the vampire was out at all meant that he was either very confident or very desperate. Lucy’d put her money on the latter, mainly because vampire didn’t so much as flinch when the door swung shut behind Claire and her, instead keeping his attention on the poor, enthralled-looking barista.

Next to Lucy, Claire stiffened as soon as she noticed the vampire.

“Is that—“

Lucy nodded sharply, and stopped her from giving themselves away with a pointed look. That sort of initial shock and surprise at seeing a vampire in its natural – or unnatural, as it were – hunting ground was something that took a while to get over, and while Lucy didn’t want to pretend that she’d ever quite gotten used to it, the sight of a bloodsucker out on the prowl didn’t throw her as much as it had when she’d first started hunting the damn things.

Well. There were worse ways to start a date, Lucy thought, though they’d probably have to find somewhere else to settle down for the afternoon afterwards.

Inconspicuously reaching into her backpack, Lucy handed Claire one of the leftover stakes from the hotel. Nodding towards the vampire, she whispered, “High and to the left.”

Claire nodded and, casual as could be, strolled up to the vampire with the stake in hand. Even now he didn’t turn to look, only briefly glancing back but, apparently, without actually really seeing anything, instead clasping the barista’s hand ever tighter across over the countertop and whispering the sort of endearments that would’ve made Lucy blush if they’d been directed towards her.

Now standing right behind the vampire and for all appearances looking as if she just wanted to order a drink, Claire clasped the stake with both hands and raised it high. There was a moment where the vampire must’ve noticed the movement out of the corner of his eyes or through some weird vampire sense or _whatever_ —but he wasn’t quick enough to react as, face scrunched up into a mask of fierce determination, Claire slammed the stake home. With all her weight put into it, the sharpened wood tore through flesh and sinew and bone and—

Did not actually hit the heart, as the vampire exploded into a mass of bats that hung in the air for all of a breath before beginning to ascend into the rafters.

Claire watched the bats disappear, and Lucy watched Claire. It wasn’t something she’d ever say out loud – “hey, I think you look pretty great splattered with bat-remains of your enemy” usually not being the type of pillow-talk that went over well – but she very much appreciated the determined set of Claire’s shoulders, the way her muscles in her arms flexed as she tightened her grip on the stake still in her hands to shake off the bits of bat that still clung to it.

Once the final bat had disappeared behind some well-placed and decidedly rusty-looking watering pots, Claire dropped her shoulders with a sigh and turned to Lucy.

“You said this usually works,” Claire accused her, non-too gently jabbing her elbow into Lucy’s ribs yet taking the pain away just as quickly with a smile.

Lucy sighed in kind, and shook her head, and tilted her head up towards the high ceiling again. There was a window all the way in the corner, and it did appear to be open, with sunlight filtering through and no sign of the vampire—

Hang on, sunlight?

With a pleased little smile, Lucy directed Claire’s attention towards the motes of dust now dancing quite merrily in the shafts of sunlight.

This meant that

**ATTEMPT #1: STAKE THROUGH THE HEART, AND CLAIRE’S TO BLAME**

may have failed, but sunlight was sunlight and the bats had flown right towards it.

> Lucy’d met a vampire once, when she was just starting out with the whole hunting-bloodsuckers thing, and it’d had been a real big fan of Bon Jovi. It had terrorized a whole street with too-loud music and a too-hungry appetite, right up until Lucy had worked up the courage to electrocute it while it was jamming away on an air guitar to _Living on a Prayer._

“Well,” Lucy said, leaning over to Claire to begin peeling bits of bat off of the front of her shirt, “the day’s still young. You want to try for a coffee somewhere else?”

 

* * *

 

It was perhaps for the best that they’d left the coffee shop fairly quickly, as the poor barista behind the counter looked as if he was going to either faint or call the police to report the attempted murder and subsequent deus ex batina he’d just witnessed.

> It’s not how Latin or the phrase itself works, yes, but let her have the pun.

Claire had tried to explain things to him, much in the same manner that Lucy had once tried to explain the startling dust-death of the McDonald’s vampire to her; whereas Lucy had found herself with an almost-victim all too willing to listen, the barista only stood there gaping open-mouthed at Claire and kept on mumbling something about having to call in pest-control.

> This sort of reaction wasn’t all that unusual, mind, but it never got to be any less annoying. If only everyone reacted as positively to being told that vampires were a very much real threat as Claire had – the damn bloodsuckers would’ve all been dead by now, hunted down by their own attempted victims.

Out on the street, the sun was still beating down blisteringly hot, the pavement sweltered in the heat, and what little grass there was seemed just a shade paler than it had when they’d entered the coffee shop twenty minutes earlier.

“Well,” Claire eventually said, “now what?”

 

* * *

 

They ended up going to the Wal-Mart after all, and after several unproductive minutes in the gardening aisle

> “I think we could totally use a garden rake to stake the vampire,” Claire said, while Lucy could only stand there and shake her head emphatically.
> 
> Been there, done that, and even if they sharpened the points of the rake it’d still not be anywhere near easy enough to actually hits a leech’s heart. All it did was make things very messy, and also make the bloodsucker very angry, which in turn made things very unpleasant for whoever was wielding the rake.
> 
> Lucy really didn’t feel like it was an experience worth repeating.

they’d migrated to the food and produce section and ended up buying enough sandwich supplies to last them a good long while.

Lucy paid for it all with the money she’d nicked—liberated from the vampires at the hotel before Claire could protest, and with their backpacks full of food they made a beeline for the one single park Andover’s Lot could lay claim to.

> A sign at the entrance of the park helpfully informed any visitors that it had been founded in the summer of 1817, just a day after Andover’s Lot itself had been established; Lucy figured that this was most likely because even then, the little town’s citizens had been searching for a way to escape the blistering heat.

It wasn’t a particularly big park – nothing was big in Andover’s Lot – but it did have a handful of trees to provide shade, a nice grassy field that looked to be about the size of a baseball field, and a single bench.

As Lucy quickly realized and alerted Claire to with a disheartened groan, said bench was occupied.

By a vampire.

The same vampire, in fact, that they had already encountered at the coffee shop.

“This is ridiculous,” Lucy complained, while Claire stared and asked, “How’s he even out in the sunlight?”

> It was a good question. Thankfully, Lucy had long since learned that in a world where vampires existed you just had to accept that some things made little sense, and so it was with fantastically well-faked confidence that she could reply,

“These things just happen, sometimes. All depends on where he’s from – the older vampires, they eventually end up being vulnerable to just about everything you hear in the stories, but the younger ones tend to only be able to be killed by the vulnerabilities of the, uh,” she shrugged, “place they originated from. Maybe wherever he was turned had no myths about vampires being killed by sunlight.”

Claire narrowed her eyes at her or the bright glare of sunlight, and didn’t question the explanation.

“I still have some blessed water left,” Lucy went on, already rooting through her back and pushing aside the now-squished bread to get at the small vial. “You hang back. I got this.”

Time for:

**ATTEMPT #2: SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT THAT SUPER SOAKER EARLIER FOR JUST 3 EASY MONTHLY INSTALLMENTS OF $29.99**

> It would’ve been better than a filed-to-a-point garden rake, in any case, even if the Wal-Mart had been charging an exorbitant price for it.

As Lucy got closer to the bench, she saw that the vampire wasn’t alone and that, yet again, he’d found himself an unwitting victim. This time it appeared to be an older man with a dog, though the dog must’ve run off somewhere, and the man was left holding only a leash and a broken collar.

> All the better for the dog, really.

“Hey there,” Lucy half-shouted at the vampire, “is that my Uncle Josh you’ve got there?”

The man didn’t do anything except continue to stare blank-eyed at the vampire, while the vampire turned around and got the whole vial’s worth of blessed water dumped in his face—

Or would have, had he not once again turned into bats just before the water hit.

Lucy stared after the swarm as it made for the trees, ineffectually flicking the drops of water that had splashed onto her fingers after them.

“This is ridiculous,” she muttered again.

 

* * *

 

And it was ridiculous. Neither Luke nor Maggie could explain to her how the vampire kept on surviving everything she and Claire had so far thrown at it, though they did try their best to impress upon Lucy over the phone that they would absolutely try to come back to Andover’s Lot as soon as possible if she felt like she needed the moral support.

> “Not a whole lot we can do against a resistant vampire either, sweetie,” Maggie had told her, sounding genuinely upset over the phone -- quite a feat, given how tinny the awful speaker made everything sound.
> 
> Lucy had waved off her offer to come charging down to Andover's Lot, then, realizing somewhat belatedly that Maggie couldn't actually see her, had said, “We’ll be fine. It’s probably just a young fletchling the hotel vampires were keeping out of house -- Claire and I can handle him.” _Possibly through a miracle,_ she hadn't said, but it had certainly been implied enough for Claire to pull a face.

Eventually, however, Lucy had been forced to hang up on the call and convene a somewhat unorthodox war council right smack dab in the middle of Andover's Lot’s one and only park.

“The problem as I see it, is that we don't even know where the vampire is hiding. If he’s young enough to be immune to sunlight, then he could be anywhere – we’ll have to figure out how to find him before we can even start to figure out how to kill him,” Claire explained in between bites of her hastily-made sandwich.

> Avocado, salt, pepper, and the distant screams of the older generation complaining about millenials destroying the housing market by way of bread spreads.

“There’s several methods we could use to try and locate him,” Lucy pondered. “Trying to find his grave would probably be the easiest. Either he’ll be in there to recuperate, or he’ll be in there sleeping, or worst case we just sit around and wait for him to show up. There’s a stable out near the church we walked past earlier, I’m sure if we ask nicely they’ll let us borrow a white horse.”

Claire’s face lit up at that, Maggie’s late-night back-of-the-car vampire hunting lessons evidently having paid off. “And if a virgin rides a white horse, it’ll refuse to walk past the vampire’s grave!”

“So we find the vampire, throw whatever we have at him, and hope that it’ll be enough.” Because they would have to deal with the leech, no question; it wouldn’t do to let even a young one like this running around a town like Andover’s Lot. Young vampires became old vampires became the sort of plague you needed a plucky team of four hunters to get rid of.

> He’d also crashed her date with Claire twice now, so Lucy felt like she was owed some compensation.

“Yes.”

“Fantastic. I’ve had worse plans.”

 

* * *

 

The little man who ran the stable eventually did end up lending them a horse, but only when Lucy convinced Claire to act the part of Distressed Horse Person In Search Of A Horse To Take Out For An Evening In Lieu Of Her Own Dead One.

> It had worked better than she’d have thought, even if the look Claire threw her behind the man’s back promised retribution.

By the time they’d actually managed to get it saddled and bridled – neither of them having had much previous experience, though Claire did let slip that she took care of a neighbor’s pony for a while when she was in grade school – dusk had fallen and the air had taken on that slightly cooler, mainly bug-filled nightly feel.

Claire climbed onto the horse, Lucy having decided early on that she wanted to be nowhere near the animal’s teeth, and pulled her up after herself, both of them wriggling around a bit until they were seated perhaps not comfortably, but at the very least not quite in danger of falling off.

Except:

Graveyard, comment about being a virgin, horse bucking them off, horse turning out to be a shapeshifted vampire, quips that would have been handled better had either Claire or Lucy had the time or motivation to think of something proper.

> Eventually you end up building up a whole repertoire of witty comebacks, but Lucy had the notion that even those repertoires would have come up short when faced with a vampire horse. Some things you just can’t reasonably plan for.

Claire and Lucy stood side by side, Claire pointing the business ends of her twin pistols at the vampire while Lucy was still digging around in her bag for the wreath of holly she’d taken a liking to after the McDonald’s incident.

The vampire, for his part, eyed the pistol with something between contempt and amusement.

“What are you going to do,” he said, “shoot me?”

Claire fired for

**ATTEMPT #3: WERE THIS AN ONLINE NEWS ARTICLE PEOPLE WOULD’VE THOUGHT IT WAS A REPOST**

hitting the vampire once in the chest and once barely in the arm.

Nothing happened, except that the vampire pulled a face—

And as Claire reloaded, Lucy threw the wreath of holly at him. It hit him with what Lucy imagined to be a dull thud, and he raised an arm to swat it away from where it had landed right on top of his head – yet before as he could so much as wrap his fingers around the holly, Claire was already firing again, the bullets streaking through the air with a faint silver trail that was probably just Lucy’s imagination and hitting the leech for

**ATTEMPT #4: IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED . . .**

There was a moment of silence. The wreath was still stuck on him, swaying slightly in the night-time breeze. The bullets had hit.

And with a sound as if the air had gone out of a balloon, skin hollowed out and bones cracked and the vampire collapsed in on himself. After another good few seconds, little more than a desiccated, paper-thin corpse remained, effectively turning Attempt #4 into

**JOINT KILL #12: THE PART WHERE THEY KILL YOU**

Once it became clear that the vampire really wasn’t going to get up and turn into a swarm of bats again, Lucy let out a relieved sigh. Next to her, Claire slumped into her and let her head loll onto Lucy’s shoulder, the pistols still clutched in her hands.

“Next time, it might be better to load the silver bullets from the start,” Lucy chuckled.

“Next time we’re not going to be riding on a shapeshifted vampire to find said vampire’s grave,” Claire replied, deadpan. “Throwing several potential weaknesses at him seems to have worked well enough, though, so we should probably pass that on to Maggie and Luke.”

“In case they run into one of these newer types as well?”

“Mainly in case they’re trying to spend a nice day out and keep on being denied their date, yes.”

Lucy turned her head to the side and placed a light kiss to the top of Claire’s head. “About that. I had a brilliant idea—“

 

* * *

 

They ended up going back to the hotel, raiding what remained of the bar, and retiring to one of the nicer suites.

> Also taking full advantage of the hot tub, the giant shower, the even larger bed, and all the fun you could have across those three.
> 
> They didn’t get much sleep that night.

 

 

 


End file.
